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Another Country is loosely based on the life of the spy Guy Burgess, renamed "Guy Bennett" in the play, and examines the effect his homosexuality and exposure to Marxism has on his life, and the hypocrisy and snobbery of the English public school he attends. The setting is a 1930s public school where pupils Guy Bennett and Tommy Judd become friends because they are both outsiders. Bennett is openly homosexual, while Judd is a Marxist.

The play opens with the discovery that a pupil named Martineau has hanged himself after being caught by a teacher having sex with another boy. The first act follows the reaction of some of the students to his death as the senior boys try to keep the scandal away from both the parents and the outside world. Barclay, the Head of Gascoigne's House, moves towards nervous breakdown, blaming himself for the boy's despair. Bennett, the only openly gay member of the school, pretends nonchalance but is deeply troubled by the suicide. His best friend Judd, the school's only Marxist, believes the death is a symptom of the school's oppressive regime. When the parents of the aristocratic Devenish threaten to remove him from the school in light of the scandal, Fowler (a prefect) attempts to crack down on the perceived perversion in his House, and to persecute Bennett in particular. The other students initially defend Bennett's provocative and incendiary behaviour (partly due to Bennett's ability to blackmail them with knowledge of their own homosexual trysts). Meanwhile, although Judd is reluctant to become a member of Twenty-Two himself (since he feels that this would endorse the school's system of oppression), he agrees – after much pressure from his peers Menzies and Bennett – in the hope of preventing the hated Fowler from becoming Head of House in the wake of the Martineau scandal. However, Judd's moral sacrifice is for nothing. In the second act, Fowler intercepts a letter from Bennett to his lover Harcourt, and Bennett's supporters fade away. Bennett is beaten, Judd is humiliated, and it is Devenish who is ultimately invited to join the school's exclusive ‘Twenty-Two’ society (which references Eton's 'Pop') in the place of Bennett, shattering Bennett's childhood dream.

In the play's closing scene, Bennett and Judd recognise that the school's illusory hold upon them has been broken and that the British class system relies strongly on outward appearances. They begin to contemplate life anew, inspired by the example of Devenish's rebellious uncle, Vaughan Cunningham (who, in a subplot, visits the school). Bennett picks up Judd's copy of Das Kapital, and muses, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all this was true?’ [1]

The title refers not only to communist Russia, which is the "other country" Bennett turns to in the end, but it can be seen to take on a number of different meanings and connotations. It could be a reference to the first line of the second (or third, depending on the version) stanza of the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country, which is sung in both the play and film, as well as referring to the fact that English public school life in the 1930s was indeed very much like "another country".

"Another Country" is also the title of a novel by James Baldwin, which includes gay and bisexual characters.

The Go-Between is a novel by L.P. Hartley (1895–1972), published in London in 1953. The movie's framing as the narration of an old man may reference the beginning line of the novel:

Friar Barnadine: "Thou hast committed--"
Barabas: "Fornication-- but that was in another country / And besides, the wench is dead."

Here "the wench" may refer to Martineau. Most of the students are more interested in covering up a potential scandal than worrying about the actual death. If so, the "adultery" may refer to what is done to Martineau and perhaps all students by the school, rather than his actual sexual liaisons.